The Chinese Pig Farmer Arrives At Cornell, Where He Takes A New Name And Learns About Boomboxes, Halter Tops And Genes.

WILLIAM HATHAWAYThe Hartford Courant

In a small apartment in Ithaca, N.Y., several Chinese-born students at Cornell University are busy giving Yang Xiangzhong pointers on how to cope with life in America.

First, you must flip your family name from front to back, they urge. And it isn't enough to make your name Xiangzhong Yang. American tongues will choke on the phonetic subtlety of Xiangzhong, they tell him, mocking botched English pronunciations of his name.

``You must pick an American name,'' one says. The others nod in agreement.

Xiangzhong is at a loss until he recalls the cartoon mouse who outwits a cat named Tom on television.

``I'll be Jerry,'' he decides. ``He seems like a pretty smart mouse.''

Beginning in the fall of 1983, Jerry Yang takes the first tentative steps toward becoming an American. He envisions only a temporary suspension of his Chinese identity, but Yang will put down deeper roots in his adopted country than he ever anticipated.

As he adjusts to life in sleepy Ithaca with its tree-lined boulevards, Yang leans heavily on his wife, Tian Xiuchun, who takes the name Cindy Tian after her arrival at Cornell.

Tian's English is better than her husband's. She is a city girl raised in Beijing, more sophisticated than her rustic husband, who navigates an alien campus at eye level with boomboxes and halter tops. She shops for clothes for Yang, whose only suit in China was the ubiquitous gray wool Mao suit -- four large pockets in front of the tunic and a high round collar.

They had met in Beijing years earlier. Tian, a young Chinese scholar, wasn't exactly swept off her feet by the diminutive agricultural scientist, a particularly unromantic suitor. Yang forgets birthdays, never buys flowers or sends love notes.

But Tian loves the intense enthusiasm and optimism he brings to his work. Yang may not be romantic, but he is persuasive. Although she is bound for Cambridge University in England, she agrees to go to Ithaca and marry him. Then he talks Cornell into taking Tian.

``Is she as smart as you?'' the dean in charge of foreign students asks in an interview.

``Smarter,'' Yang says.

Yang is shy and flashes a disarmingly impish grin from under a sweep of black hair in a style less of Mao than Mo of the Three Stooges. Yang seldom discusses world politics and in public never criticizes the Chinese government. He hews to an old Chinese saying: ``If you are going to beat your dog, close the door.''

Tian is more like their American friends, direct in her speech and willing to discuss shortcomings of their respective governments. ``If people had as much freedom as we do here, there would be major chaos,'' Tian says of China. ``There are just so many people.''

A Sense Of Obligation

Besides his wife, Yang relies heavily on the advice of his mentor, Robert Foote, a professor of animal science. Cornell is a destination for many Chinese students, in part because of Foote's friendship with An Min, dean of Yang's alma mater, Beijing Agricultural University. It was An Min who told Foote about the promising young embryologist.

Foote, like many Western scientists who opened their labs to the first wave of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese students arriving in the 1980s, is both impressed and somewhat bewildered by his new charges. They are different in many ways than American and other foreign students. For one thing, they work much harder.

Even after Tian gives birth to their son, Andrew, in 1988, she works a full-time job while pursuing a doctoral degree in molecular biology. Both Yang and Tian feel an abiding obligation and gratitude to China for sending them overseas. If a day goes by without working, they feel a sense of shame.

Foote and other senior scientists notice something else about their Chinese charges, who were raised in a culture that gives great deference to authority and under a political system that ruthlessly punishes dissenters. Try as they might, they cannot get their Chinese students to challenge their superiors or propose their own research projects.

But for Foote and other American scientists, the presence of Chinese graduate and postdoctoral students in their laboratories is a blessing in countless ways. Seven days a week, the students run day-to-day lab operations. Their dedication enables American scientists to publish a prodigious amount of research during the 1980s and 1990s. During Yang's stay, the Cornell College of Agriculture, and Foote's lab in particular, builds a national reputation for excellence.

In his decade at Cornell, Yang dwells on a single overriding goal -- to use his knowledge of animal embryology to help feed rural China. Yang masters new micromanipulation technology that allows him to study how embryos develop.

He believes that by intervening at an early stage of development, it may be possible to coax the fertilized egg of a valuable animal to divide into two -- or more -- genetically identical embryos. The embryos from, say, a champion dairy cow could then be implanted into surrogates, yielding a crop of potentially productive cows.

He also presses Western scientists to visit China, and Chinese scientists in the United States to spend at least a few months each year back home. For him personally, the question of returning to China is not so much about if, but when.

His message is a hard sell. His fellow Chinese students are not returning home. Even before the People's Liberation Army crushes protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the students begin settling down and raising families in the United States.

Yang understands his peers' reluctance to return. The best higher education institutions in China, gutted by the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, lag far behind U.S. universities. But he asks his fellow students: How can life ever get better in poor villages if you will not bring your knowledge home? How will China ever rebuild its higher educational system without you, the brightest students?

Going Home

The next year, in 1993, Yang decides that it is time to pay his own debt to China. He makes plans to go home.

During the spring, Yang and Tian go to Beijing to explore potential academic openings. They are standing at a busy Beijing intersection, when their 5-year-old son, Andrew, wriggles out of the clutches of his grandmother and runs off the curb. The couple hears the thud of a military car hitting their son. Andrew flies 40 yards through the air before he hits concrete. The blow is so fierce it snaps Andrew's right leg in half. Doctors later find that his brain is 30 degrees off kilter.

At the hospital, Yang and Tian panic. They know that Andrew is receiving woefully substandard care by U.S. standards. They fear for their son's life. They have no idea where they can go to find better care.

They are also furious at the condition of the military vehicle that struck their son; the vehicle's brakes had failed. They complain bitterly to authorities about the negligence that nearly killed Andrew.

Government officials counter by threatening to revoke their visas. The couple fears not only for the health of their son, but also for the lives and careers they have built in the United States.

``You realize then that you do not live in a science lab,'' Tian says. ``You live in the real world.''

It is not until six weeks later that authorities relent and allow them to leave.

Robert Foote drives to the Syracuse airport to pick up the couple. In the airport terminal, he looks down a corridor and spots Yang, carrying his son in his arms, tears running down his face.

Tian puts an end to family discussions about a return to China. Andrew grows up hating the government of the country his father loves, though Yang still nurtures a dream of helping poor farmers who live on the desolate rolling plains, one calamity away from starvation.

A startling scientific discovery will soon supply him the tools for a breathtaking gift not only to China, but to the world.